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Do you struggle with “liking” a sad story on Facebook? This may help

Facebook adds new emoticons for users.

All of us at one time or another have run across a posting on someone’s Facebook page about a sad experience or a troubled time the poster is going through and wished there was another button other than the “Like” button to press.

Well, according to an article on BBC, Facebook is about to roll out a set of new emoticons that will allow you to more accurately express your feelings about the postings.

Mark Zuckerberg, in a conference call with analysts after the company’s impressive financial results, confirmed that the new tools will be called Reactions, and they are being tested in Spain, Ireland and some other places and will be available everywhere in the near future.

The new emoticons are going to be labeled “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry”, as well as retaining the familiar established “Like” button. Originally, there was also a “yay” button, but apparently in testing, no on really understood exactly how or when to use it, so it was dropped from the list.

Zuckerberg says the company was trying to add a little complexity to something that was simple. He adds when you share a sad piece of content, or something that makes you mad when you read it, you didn’t have the appropriate tool to react to it.

Advertisers are looking forward to the new emoticons as well. This new data could possibly give them a more accurate measurement of people’s reactions to product postings and business pages.

Simon Calvert, head of strategy at the marketing agency Lida, says emotions travel five times faster than rational thought, and the ability to build better emotional connections is prized by advertisers. He adds the new system will be very interesting if it accurately reflects actual human emotions.

Of course, advertisers will need to proceed with caution during the evaluation period of the data collected from the new emoticons. Decoding the actual meanings of the “likes,” “sads,” and other button clicks can be tricky and might lead to fragmented data and drawing the wrong conclusion.

Evidence shows that people tend to open up their emotions on social media, but only time will tell if the new buttons are accepted by the public and incorporated into usable data for advertisers.